Listening to BBC after Nelson Mandela
died left me sleep deprived. It was virtually nonstop from midnight to 5
a.m. on WVXU, and BBC demonstrated how a first-class news organization
covers a major story.

Fifty years after JFK was killed, I
still don’t get the popular fascination with him. And until someone convinces me that
it matters to our public policy today, I really don’t care who killed him or what
was behind those fatal shots in Dallas.

I still object to shield laws. They are a de facto
form of licensing reporters. You are your sources are unprotected if
you’re not included in the definition of “journalist” or your work isn’t
considered “journalism.”

Don’t you just hate it when a president and attorney general expect us to trust them? Missile Gap. Watergate. Tonkin Gulf. War on Terror. All stinking precedents. Now, it’s Obama and Holder and their faux contrition for overzealous feds snooping in reporters’ emails and phone calls.

If Zimmerman is guilty of anything, it was prosecutors,
not jurors, who let him walk free. That kind of over-charging isn’t alien
to Hamilton County, but it too rarely is questioned by reporters,
especially when pleas to lesser charges are accepted by prosecutors and
judges.

Thirty-nine years ago, Enquirer editors agreed to cover a global story that still reverberates through some of Christianity’s oldest denominations: the acrimonious debate over whether women may be priests.